You can find Fonts Café vintage, hand drawn typefaces, graphics and frames on menus, book covers, signs, greeting cards and posters, from the middle of the Med to the Marrakech Medina to the Mount Barker Shopping Centre in South Australia.
That doesn’t sound like such a big deal until you realize that a solo Italian graphic artist created them all, and designed and directed the construction of a Drupal e-commerce website to sell them, and while she was doing all that, learned to speak and write English.
At the time I wrote the welcoming website copy at the bottom of this page there was no warm and fuzzy About Page at fontscafe.com to weave it into so we squeezed it (kinda like kerning in font-speak) onto the site’s home page for the time being, and, like the plumber with the bucket under his sink, it’s still there — X’tagħmel! (“What can you do” in Maltese.) It’s a work in progress. 😇
I find it so inspiring that type designs from a one woman foundry can have such global reach — one was on Broadway FFS — that it’s become a bit of a FFS (For Fonts’ Sake) mission for me to send photos, screeshots and URLs to Fonts Café every time I find a product that I think is boasting her graphics or type. You can join the font fan club and spam her as well on the FCC Facebook Page. Seems to me there are prizes for that kind of behaviour once in a while.
For close to a year, Jon (r) and I (l) used Paddy Dillon‘s great guidebook from Cicerone Press, “Walking on Malta” to explore hundreds of kilometres of tracks and trails on the islands of the Maltese archipelago.
We didn’t set out to be font hunters but there are bistros, bars and buses — even on the back roads — (and Malta’s back roads are way back!) and almost without fail we found at least one sign or menu or package flaunting a Fonts Café font — even Made in Malta products!
— photo thanks to Google Local Guide, Christian Gregoire
Set up on the west side of Mġarr ix-Xini in Gozo each summer, Harry’s Food Truck makes a mean veggie burger, but you have to ask for it, at least you did when we were there. The menu items on the sign shown at the top of this page are set in Fonts Café’s Hand Shop C30. #yourockHarry! #goveganHarry!
Mea culpa: this photo was taken before I was vegan.
Welcome to Fonts Café
Welcome to Fonts Café, home to hand-crafted fonts and graphic elements that are as delicious together as cappuccino and croissants.
From the independent foundry that created possibly the most popular chalkboard-friendly font ever — Chalk Hand Lettering — Fonts Café typefaces, graphic elements and frames pop up all over the world; from café menus, bistro boardwalk signs and wine lists to restaurant and burger bus branding.
Our vintage, varsity and advertising typefaces are loved by down-home designers AND big city agencies alike: from Bollywood to Broadway, Covent Garden to Rio and Oz; from small studios like this one to international names like ABC, Disney and Mattel.
Fully-featured Fonts Café fonts, whether purchased individually or in one of our savings-packed bundles, come with world-class personal support; lifetime, no-strings-attached licensing; and our sincere thanks for your support all these years.
Grazzi, as we say here in Malta.